Entering Sven’s room

“When Sven first passed away, the emotional impact of his loss made it difficult for us to reflect on his work from an institutional perspective. But sometime later, we visited his family, who invited us into his “room” and showed us his works, sketches, notebooks, torn-up ideas, early and unfinished works, and ongoing projects…” This is how Elena Bini, Head of Collection and Archive, and Katia Cont, Cataloguing, describe the start of the years-long research project that reconstructed, cataloged and mapped the work and relationships of the South Tyrolean artist, Sven Sachsalber, who passed away prematurely in 2020.

The results of this research and cataloguing project were presented to the public in the exhibition Sven Sachsalber. Mapping Out an Artistic Practice: a Research Project by Museion. In this edition of Bulletin, we offer a behind-the-scenes look at this project that focuses on different worlds, from Val Venosta to New York, and shifts between the familiarity of personal friendship to the detached perspective of institutional distance.

What was the bond between Sachsalber and Museion?

Elena Bini: Museion had staged his Hands exhibition, curated by Frida Carazzato in the Project Room in 2014 and then, in 2015 it acquired a video of his performance WILHALM (Curon). In 2020, the museum also displayed one of his works in the group show unlearning categories. Right from his first exhibition, Sachsalber became part of “life” at Museion. He used to drop by every so often, he visited our exhibitions and he frequented Museion spaces. It was difficult not to become attached to an artist like Sven, as he had the innate qualities and ability to maintain relationships naturally, without forcing them. This meant that he managed to remain in contact with the entire museum team who knew him, from the security services to the bookshop staff and the curators to the Collection department.

Museion began this research project even if it was not the official guardian of this artist’s legacy. What drove you to invest resources in this initiative?

EB: In following Sachsalber’s journey, Museion recognized and continues to recognize the artistic value of an emerging young artist whose career was interrupted suddenly and prematurely. Obviously, when Sven first passed away, the emotional impact of his loss made it difficult for us to reflect on his work from an institutional perspective. But sometime later, we visited his family, his mother and grandmother, who invited us into his “room” and showed his works, sketches, notebooks, torn-up ideas, early and unfinished works, and ongoing projects … that was when it became clear that we had to “photograph” everything in a systematic inventory … The urgency of this also depended on the fact that a central aspect of Sachsalber’s art were the relationships he built up over the years and, therefore, the stories of his friends, curators and fellow artists. This element was not only extremely important, it was also ephemeral, as it is based on the memories of the people who knew him.

How did your work on Sachsalber’s archive differ from a simple artwork catalog?

EB: When you come into contact with an artist’s archive, your first impression is a bit like finding yourself in Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, surrounded by a vast jumble of material, all open to different perceptions, narratives, traces, and possible interpretations. At this point, your research doesn’t focus so much on cataloging all the material, but on identifying trajectories of meaning and criteria for finding your way through a web of complexity that resists any linear and definitive interpretation.
Your approach becomes almost that of a “detective” searching for clues that can help to philologically reconstruct a whole. In an archive, no one work or document is more important than another. Our work is not about being a curator. On the contrary, we seek to understand, to order, and sometimes to simplify, to preserve, and make all these works and material accessible. … in the end, you can’t help growing attached to the artist and their archive.

Following on from that, Sachsalber’s works—and relationships—are spread across different worlds and places. So, what was it like to reconstruct a legacy that moves in such distant universes?

Katia Cont: Mapping Sachsalber’s legacy meant primarily realizing (and accepting) that it has no single center. His works, his material and, above all, his relationships moved from Val Venosta to New York, from his home to his studio, and from an intimate and familiar sphere (Heimat) to an international dimension. Our greatest challenge was to hold these different poles together without creating a hierarchy and without interpreting the local dimension as a “starting point” and the international one as an “arrival,” or vice versa.

What challenges and difficulties did you face?

KC: From a practical point of view, his legacy was certainly fragmented. There were works in different places, scattered documents, unfinished works, works split into different parts or linked to specific contexts and relationships that existed and continue to exist more in people’s memory and correspondence than in structured archives and catalogs. Perhaps the greatest difficulty of all, though, was conceptual: that of forming a coherent image of an artistic life. In this sense, mapping his legacy did not mean reducing everything to a perfect and definitive order, but rather highlighting a movement and the relationships connected to it.

Sachsalber is often associated with his on-the-brink performances…

KC: Mapping his legacy rendered an image of Sven that was much broader than that of his “extreme” performances. Alongside his actions, what emerged most notably were his drawings, but also his notebooks, writings and preparatory works that reveal a process of continuous reflection and experimentation. Drawings, in particular, are a constant presence. This highly varied material also shows the artist’s constant desire to experiment with different media and artistic references, as well as his drive to engage and interact with himself and the world through art.

Did any unexpected or surprising elements emerge from your research?

KC: Rather than anything unexpected, what we did discover was a more intimate and everyday dimension to his work. The figure that often emerges from this archive is a Sven Sachsalber that is pensive, ironic, but extremely attentive to detail. In my personal meetings with him, I always remember him as a very precise person. I was also struck by the continuity of his artistic practice that was very consistent and based on small drawings, sketches, and notes.

The exhibition Sven Sachsalber. Mapping Out an Artistic Practice: a Research Project by Museion – curated by BAU, Lisa Mazza and Simone Mair is on display in the Museion Passage exhibition space until 21.06.2026 (free admission). The artist’s digital archive is online and allows the public to explore some of his over 350 works and digital material (https://www.museion.it/en/sven-sachsalber-research-project)

The research project on the South Tyrolean artist Sven Sachsalber (1987–2020) was promoted by Museion, funded by the German Culture Department of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, and conducted in collaboration with the BAU – Institute for Contemporary Art and Ecology – and the artist’s family.